Life is only short when you’re close to death.
You’re always close to death.
So many folks out there who want to be celebrated, ain’t but precious few doin’ shit worth talkin’ about.
1983? I must’ve been eight, maybe nine or ten. Grade three, or four, elementary school library, when I came across this big ol’ book of spaceships. I’m not gonna risk insulting any living or dead artists by trying to name them as ones whose work adorned those musty, public school- beaten pages (because sci-fi is a stigma, dear, and one that you must own completely and wholeheartedly or not at all, and disassociation opens up more doors than not), but I will say that whoever’s work it was blew my mind, in only ways that such things can. The literal blowing of a young person’s mind is a special thing indeed, for it’s an event that plants seeds that instantly germinate and flourish into bizarre growths that even that loamy bedrock has trouble describing. Oh, the heights to which those marvelous glimpses into impossible futures took me! If you only knew! And therein lies the tragedy of all of that, how no matter how hard I try, through word or pixel or scratch of the pencil, I will never be able to translate the visions from the orchard that sprung up from those days, and the tragic want I have to do so is what feeds this ongoing depression of the creative mind. But still I try, still I maintain.
“Yeah?“
“Sure, yeah. I think there are just as many confused, awkward, and lonely people out there now as there ever was, just that more of them have louder voices than they did before.”
“Isn’t it ironic?”
“What’s ironic?”
“That these supposedly introverted and shy people are reaching such a wide audience?”
“That’s not irony at all, because I never said they were shy or introverted. Besides, introversion is a myth, but I’m too tired to go into it. No, it’s not ironic because all these people are doing is communicating on a wider scale. They might speak a language that you, personally, don’t understand, and that’s fine. It makes your reaction to their message all the more logical. It’s just that you’re noticing now the greater amplitude of their broadcasting because it’s starting to infringe on the mainstream, on the popular culture. That’s all.”
“You know how I know there’s no God, and if there is He hates me?”
“How?”
“Because sometimes when I go to take a piss it comes out sideways, completely missing the bowl. Absolutely matters not one bit how straight I think I’m aiming. It’s a big mess. What kind of God would allow that to happen unless for His own cruel amusement?“
The warm wet air comes in and it saturates everything. I think that there’s still droplets of the Japanese summer lodged in my sinuses, and they’re sitting there to remind me of the long hot days, under truly oppressive grey skies, listening to the cicada chirp and little else.
It sounds a bit awful, doesn’t it? For me, back then, it was the atmosphere of adventure. It wrapped my myopic world in a hot, damp blanket that defined the unknown, a real fog that I had to navigate to find my way across the harsh and unforgiving alien landscape that was Japan.
I would go back to those early days in an instant, just to lie on the green tatami mats that floored that first tiny apartment we lived in in Yono-shi. To remember those days of having zero opportunities, no prospects for the future, and wear the cowl of abject poverty and the mantle of gaijin, auslander, foreigner. I believe it was the last and only time in my life that I ever felt true mastery over my domain, and that reduction to being a nothing person was so absolute it was pure liberation.
There was this vast expanse of open field near where we used to live. It had gone fallow, and when I was old enough to wonder about such things I got curious about who owned it. It wasn’t a public park; there were no paths or benches or anything. If you were to wade out into the waist high—for a ten-year-old—grass you’d come out with ticks and spiders and snakes biting at your heels. There was a raised concrete path that ran to one side of this empty plain, and a straight stretch of river on the other side of that. I rode that path every weekday and some weekends for years, as it was the most convenient way to get into town. At some point, someone had gone out into the middle of that field and erected a concrete monolith. It was a tapering obelisk about a storey tall, featureless and made of that kind of concrete that’s got obvious pebbles in it. I asked my father what it meant, and he told me it was an ownership marker, that someone had bought the tract of land.
I wondered what they’d build there.
My city had a big problem with poverty. There were homeless people everywhere, and over time we got used to ignoring them. It wasn’t that we dehumanized them, it’s just that there were only so many times you could refuse to help before you plunged into depression. Tt was a self-defence mechanism to put those poor people out of mind. At least, that’s what I tell myself now to feel better about how I treated them. What could I do, though? I was only slightly better off myself, with a roof over my head and a job that paid pennies. My point about these underprivileged folk was that there was the huge field next to the river that someone had bought that was now awaiting development, and I wondered if that maybe whoever owned it would build some housing for the homeless.
That monolith stood in the field, and the field remained empty, for all of my young life. I left home when I was twenty-three, a bit old by some standards, but I’d had a run in with drugs and it took that long to get my life together enough to stand on my own. In all of that time nothing happened in the field near my home, unless you call the weathering of the stone marker “something happening“. It got capped in a white layer of guano, and green moss crept up from the bottom until it looked like a narrow spire of a snow-capped, tree-ringed, stone mountain. When I visited again in my late 30’s they’d built a tall row of condominiums there by the river. The cheapest units started at 250K.
In order to live, you must first learn how to die.
“And we saw on the horizon a bloody sunrise, redder than any in living memory, and we knew that the East was afire, and we trembled to behold that ashen aftermath.”
Today I had a date with a young woman (24) who told me that she’d decided to have her wedding ceremony in Mexico, only she hadn’t yet found a suitable groom.
They say that 33% of the women in the city where I live are single. I don’t know who they are, probably whoever collected the data, but now when I’m out walking and I see a woman on her own I wonder: one in three? I asked one of my neighbors what she thought of that particular statistic.
“With the quality of men today, I’m not surprised. All they want to do is fuck and move on.”
I would assume that, all things being equal, there are just as many closeted female homosexual or asexual people out there as there are male. If binary sexual congress is the least important thing in a relationship, wouldn’t a civil partnership with someone you love make sense? It would sure beat living alone.
It’s a shame that society and our upbringings have ruined love for so many of us.
She spend the better part of the afternoon typing up a several-thousand word “think piece” that contained all of her collected opinions on why she acted a certain way. Satisfied that it was airtight and expressed her views with such perfection that it could be carved into stone and immortalized as a deathless belief, she posted it to her social networks and awaited validation.
Meanwhile, her computer gave her brain cancer.
2015.07.06 – 2015.07.31